How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It (Juniper Prize for Poetry)

Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo , the over in lover ? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future? Cover 1 Title Page 5 Copyright 6 Dedication 7 Contents 9 Dead Reckoning 15 A New New Guide 16 The Igneous Hours 17 Driving Lessons 18 Eleven Days in Alicante 19 S.O.S. 21 Wanderlust 22 The One-Hit Wonders 23 If You’re Anything like Me 24 A New New Guide to Heredity 25 Stille Nacht 26 Drunkest Etc. 27 At Washington Square Tavern 28 The Bridge between Us 29 Museum of the Heart 30 Another Version of My Confession 32 A New New Guide to Lunar Ambulation 33 Every Promise Eventually Sounds like an Apology 34 Boy George Is My Spirit Animal 35 The Pillow Book 37 Because I Am Stuck in My Own Syntax 39 The Lovemaking Habits of Icebergs 40 My Desire Is an Orchestra That Only Knows One Song 41 Kiss Me and You Will See How Important You Are 42 The Mondegreen 43 A New New Guide to Irony 44 The January of Having Everything 45 The Persuasion 46 The Accident 47 Sure, I Took the Pamphlet on Breaking Bad Habits 48 Charades 49 In Flagrante 50 A New New Guide to Root Vegetables 51 Mutual Disambiguation 52 In Our Garden of Eden 53 The Prophecy 54 Please Don’t Leave Me Unattended 55 How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It 56 A New New Guide to Entropy 57 We All Get Turned Around 58 In My Wandering Circus of Desire 59 Vanishing Points of Arrival 60 Sanguine 61 Sweet Girl 62 A New New Guide to Self-Help 63 Weapons of Probable Destruction 64 Having Said That 65 Tell Me the One about the Marxist with a Horse Named Trotsky 66 Delivery by Mouth 68 The Flightless Birds 69 Because There’s No Emoji for Memory 70 Appassionata Sonata & Other Works for Solo Piano 71 Death Mask 23 72 Don’t Stay, Don’t Go 73 A New New Guide to Husbandry 74 Whistling Dixie 75 Mixed Messages 76 Plasticity Theory 77 Bloom Box Ode 78 Poem Beginning with a Sentence by Dean Young 79 A New New Guide to Mobility 80 Souvenir 81 Coin-Toss Theories 82 All Such Intimacies 83 Poem in Defense 84 Know This 85 With These Wings 86 Notes 87 Acknowledgments 89 Back Cover 94 Winner of Ploughshares 2022 John C. Zacharis First Book Award Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger Who put the end in crescendo , the over in lover ? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future? This volume is the forty-eighth recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, established in 1975 by University of Massachusetts Press in collaboration with the UMass Amherst MFA program for Poets and Writers. The prize is named in honor of the poet Robert Francis (1901–1987), who for many years lived in Fort Juniper, a tiny home of his own construction, in Amherst. Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, this collection of poems offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image.